The goal of this panel is to provide new analyses of the ways in which the representation of traumatic experience informs and shapes narrative structure. This panel foregrounds texts that, when read together, expose the portability of the narratological study of trauma; the papers range across fields, from nineteenth-century British literature to contemporary multiethnic memoir, graphic novels, and photography. The panel’s interdisciplinary focus exemplifies the broad utility of the intersections of trauma and narrative, as well as its continued relevance to contemporary literary study.

Since the 1990s, literary representations of traumatic experience have been a continued focus of study for scholars of literary and cultural studies. The papers in this panel speak to the broad range of definitions of trauma and healing, taking inspiration from Cathy Caruth’s (1995, 1996) foundational analysis of the belatedness of traumatic experience, Ron Eyerman’s (2001) consideration of the role of cultural trauma in shaping collective identity, and Stef Craps’s (2009) critique of the Eurocentric focus of Caruthian and structural trauma theory. By examining the varied ways that trauma informs narrative structure, the panel follows Joshua Pederson’s (2014) lead in using narrative analysis to move beyond the traditional paradigm of trauma narratives.

The panel consists of four papers which will be strictly limited to twelve minutes to allow for a robust discussion. The papers have been chosen with a particular eye for maintaining diversity across rank, university, and geographic location, thereby highlighting a variety of perspectives and positionalities. Each paper focuses on different genres and forms of narrative, revealing the wide applicability of the study of trauma and narrative structure.

Kaleigh Langston will begin the panel with an examination of trauma and narrative structure in that most quintessential of forms: the nineteenth-century British novel. In “’Leave sunny imaginations hope’: Trauma and Form in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette,” Langston argues that the form of Villette is shaped by the narrator’s traumatic experiences. She explicates how the narrator’s traumatic experiences prompt her to treat her readers with mistrust. Using Robyn Warhol’s terminology, Langston considers how the narrator uses traditionally engaging tactics to create distance between herself and the reader, ultimately refusing the emotional catharsis of closure.

In “Mourning as Racial Trauma in Mixed Race Literature,” Roberta Wolfson considers how trauma is represented in contemporary literature. Focusing specifically on contemporary novels and memoirs with mixed race Asian and Black American protagonists, Wolfson analyzes a unique form of racial trauma. She asserts that for mixed race people the loss of a parent or grandparent can be a traumatic experience as it constitutes a double loss of both the individual and the mourner’s perceived connection to a racial community. In her analysis of recent texts like Heidi Durrow’s novel The Girl Who Fell From the Sky (2011), Danzy Senna’s novel New People (2017), Michelle Zauner’s memoir Crying in H Mart (2021), and Ingrid Hu Dahl’s memoir Sun Shining on Morning Snow (2025), Wolfson considers how mourning as racial trauma both structures texts and reveals how writing operates as a mode of healing.

Lan Dong, in “Narrating and Illustrating Trauma and Food,” explicates how Thien Pham’s graphic narrative Family Style: Memories of an American from Vietnam (2023) uses the affordances of comics to represent the past and present experiences of the first-person narrator Thien and the wider Vietnamese diaspora. Family Style’s chapters bear the titles of Vietnamese and American food items; read together, they construct memories of Thien’s life in Vietnam and the United States. Dong investigates how Pham’s graphic novel draws connections between traumatic experiences, survival, and perseverance and the representation of culturally significant food and food practices. While Family Style follows a recent trend in graphic narratives by exploring the role of food in the construction of memory, it distinguishes itself through its focus on building stories in and between the fragmented memories of trauma.

Finally, Rosette Simityan will finish the panel with “Memory and Melodrama: Diana Markosian’s Reanimation of Family Trauma.” Simityan examines Diana Markosian’s photobook Santa Barbara (2020), which revisits Markosian’s traumas and family secrets born out of her family’s migration from Armenia to the United States. By narrativizing her family history into a scripted episode of the soap opera Santa Barbara with visual and textual narrative, Markosian unearths the silences that defined her childhood. Building on the work of Marianne Hirsch, Peter Bruek, and Tina Campt, Simityan articulates how film, photography, television, and cultural ephemera fill the narrative absences left by family trauma.